Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition (Studies in Legal History)

In 1960, consensual sodomy was a crime in every state in America.Fifty-five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the fundamental right to marry.In the span of two generations, American law underwent a dramatic transformation.Though the fight for marriage equality has received a considerable amount of attention from scholars and the media, it was only a small part of the more than half-century struggle for queer family rights.Family Matters uncovers these decades of advocacy, which reshaped the place of same-sex sexuality in American law and society - and ultimately made marriage equality possible.This book, however, is more than a history of queer rights.Marie-Amélie George reveals that national legal change resulted from shifts at the state and local levels, where the central figures were everyday people without legal training.Consequently, she offers a new way of understanding how minority groups were able to secure meaningful legal change.